Samsung has revealed a brand new smartphone camera unit with a 13-megapixel sensor, optical image stabilization, and improved low light performance. The announcement (in Korean) explains that the camera's OIS will correct camera shake up to 1.5°—better than the HTC One's 1° OIS.

Because the camera can be hand-held without causing blurriness from an unsteady photographer, Samsung claims that the low light performance is eight times better than current smartphone cameras. The whole component measures at 10.5 x 10.5 x 5.9mm and will feature power-saving technology.

Samsung's press release doesn't name any devices that the new camera will appear in, but tech experts are guessing that we will see it next year in the Galaxy S5 and Note 4.

All the camera manufacturers are trying to woo customers with "improvements" that really won't improve mobile photos. Megapixels, stabilization, etc. Stabilization may help out chumps that don't even pay attention to staying steady, but they don't care about good photos anyway.

For people that do stay steady, you're still shooting at 1/20 shutter speed in anything less than bright light. At that speed, anything moving is blurred. No amount of pixels or stabilization will help. All those blurry party pictures might have clearer backgrounds with Samsung's new unit, but the blurriness of the subjects won't benefit much.

From the image, the lens would be no more than a 1.8mm aperture. Which is only half the 3.3mm of the Nokia 808's lens, the current smartphone class leader. Therefore, this new device can only capture 1/4 the light of the class leader and won't be that interesting.

Considering most smartphone photos seem to be of people, using SS lower than 1/30 seem to be of little value. My guess is that, like regular cameras, the OIS will merely encourage less savvy photographers to create camera-steady photos with motion blur.

Be that as it may, instead of the whole picture becoming a blurry mess, with image stabilization you can have atleast a partly sharp picture. It matters. Then there's also more hope of getting the whole picture sharp.

I don't have data but I'm pretty sure handshake is a far greater image ruiner than motion blur. Though it's doubtful that these optical stablizations even allow really super long shutter times.

There's no negatives to this technology. Samsung may be a bit late to the game but bring it on! Every manufacturer.